Fisheries Centre The University of British Columbia Working Paper Series Working Paper #2015 - 28 Tentative adjustments of China's marine fisheries catches (1950-2010) Daniel Pauly and Frédéric Le Manach Year: 2015 Email: [email protected] This working paper is made available by the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. Tentative adjustments of China's marine fisheries catches (1950-2010) Daniel Pauly1 and Frédéric Le Manach1,2 1 Sea Around Us, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada 2 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, UMR212 Ecosystèmes Marins Exploités, Avenue Jean Monnet, CS 30171, 34203 Sète cedex, France [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract The marine catch of China in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has been officially overestimated for years, while the catches of China’s distant-water fleets are officially underestimated. Given a recent reduction of the domestic catch figure published by the FAO, and a recent independent estimate of the catch of China’s distant-water fleet, the overall, global marine catch of China from 2000 to 2010 appear to be in the 12-13 million t·year-1 range. Of this total, around 8.6 million t·year-1 are caught in the Chinese EEZ, and around 4 million t in the EEZs of other countries (especially in West Africa) and in the High Seas. Of the current domestic marine catch, slightly less than two-thirds is caught by large-scale, industrial vessels, and one third by artisanal gears. Estimates of recreational catches (around 50,000 t·year-1 in recent years), subsistence catches (1% of the artisanal catch) and discards (0.5 % of the artisanal and industrial catch) are also presented, but these are even more tentative than our artisanal and industrial landing figures. Introduction The People's Republic of China (here: China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan, but including Macau)1 is rapidly growing to regain its historic role as one of the leading economies of the world. Its enormous consumption of resources of all kinds and output of a huge variety of manufactured and other products have huge impacts on the economies of other countries. However, China, which is leading the world in a number of scientific and technological fields, remains saddled with an opaque statistical system which not only does not keep up with the country's development, but actively distorts production figures. Indeed, not a week passes without international news outlets picking up on this. For example, China is thought to massage its population statistics (Zhao and Zhang 2010) and its economic indicators (Worstall 2012; Oqvist 2013). With regards to marine fisheries, this statistical issue manifests itself in (i) an inflated 'domestic' catch (i.e., from the Exclusive Economic Zone [EEZ] claimed by China (see Figure 1), as demonstrated by Watson and Pauly (2001), and (ii) a huge unreported catch by 1 Separate catch reconstructions exist for Hong Kong (Sumaila et al. 2007) and Taiwan (Kuo and Booth 2011), which are being updated. 1 China's distant-water fleet (Pauly et al. 2013). It is further suggested that China may also over- report its aquaculture production (FAO 2012b; Godfrey 2013). Therefore, this contribution has three goals: 1. To update the contribution of Watson and Pauly (2001) in order to adjust the officially reported marine catches of China to a level where they become compatible with reconstructed (rather than official) catches from waters similar to those in China's EEZ; 2. To integrate, to the extent possible, the estimated distant-water fisheries catch of China into a coherent framework, harmonized to the extent possible with the landings database maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO); and 3. To provide a basis for discussion with Chinese colleagues who might be interested in the medium- or long-term in a reform of China's fisheries statistical system. Figure 1. Map showing the extent of China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (grey area), as well as the other areas it claims (stripped areas; either High Seas or claimed by other countries). The southern part is known as the ‘Cow’s Tongue’. 2 Materials and Methods China's domestic catches Watson and Pauly (2001) quantified the extent of over-reporting of China's reported domestic catch by comparing catch densities in China's EEZ with the catch density in the rest of the world, based mainly on FAO landings data spatialized over a cell grid of 0.5 degree latitude and longitude (Watson et al. 2004) and a general linear model (GAM) with dependent variables, one of which was a dummy variable stating whether a cell belonged to China's EEZ or not. The GAM’s positive (and significant) partial slope associated with this dummy variable both confirmed that catch densities in the Chinese EEZ were significantly higher than in the rest of the world, and allowed estimation of what China's catches would be with this dummy variable set at zero (i.e., if Chinese catches were comparable to those of the rest of the world; see Figure 2 in Watson and Pauly 2001). However, the Sea Around Us 'reconstructed' the catch of numerous countries in the last decade (Zeller et al. 2007; Zeller and Pauly 2007; Zeller and Harper 2009; Harper and Zeller 2012; Harper et al. 2012), and concluded that while China over-reports its domestic catch, other countries under-report the marine fisheries catch they report to the FAO by about 30-50% in developed countries, and often 100% in developing countries. Since it was such under-reported catch data that served as the baseline with which the official Chinese catches were compared, it is therefore likely that Watson and Pauly (2001) overestimated the extent to which China over- reported the catch of its domestic marine fisheries. Extrapolating the trends in Watson and Pauly (2001; Figure 2A) into the 2000s would thus suggest that the EEZ (over-)corrected catch of China is about 6 million t·year-1 while the uncorrected catch would be about 10 million t·year-1, i.e., 1.67 times the uncorrected catch. As 67% is about halfway between the 30-50% underreporting for developed countries (see e.g., Zeller et al. 2011) and the 100% underreporting of many large developing countries (see e.g., Cisneros-Montemayor et al. 2013; Ulman et al. 2013), we can conclude that a catch of 10 million t·year-1 would be possible as a first estimate of the marine domestic catch of China that would have been obtained after comparison with globally reconstructed and spatialized catches (Figure 3). Another way that China's catch could be re-evaluated is to spatialize the reconstructed catches of all countries and predict catch densities for the Chinese EEZ, by year, using the variables identified by Watson and Pauly (2001) as predictors for the Chinese catch by cell and year (primary production, depth, temperature, etc.). However, this cannot be done at present as reconstructions are lacking for numerous countries' EEZ and their catch have currently not been spatialized (as of September 2013). A third approach was adopted here. Based on the data published by Watson and Pauly (2001; Figure 2A), we plotted the percentage of ‘Total reported to FAO’ included in the ‘corrected EEZ catch’, from 1970 to 2000 (Figure 2B). We then applied a linear regression to this time-series and extrapolated its trend to cover the entire 1950-2010 period (from 1950 to 1956, this ratio was higher than 100% and was therefore set to 100%; Figure 2B). Finally, we applied this time- series, representing the estimated percentage of the total catch caught within China’s EEZ, to 3 the updated set of total catch extracted from FAO’s FishStat (FAO 2012a), which resulted in an updated estimate of China’s catch within its EEZ for the period 1970-2010 (Figure 2C; see final update from 1950 to 2010 in Figure 4). Note that three species not occurring in the Chinese EEZ (i.e., Alaska pollock, Japanese jack mackerel, and Pacific sandlance; www.fishbase.org), as well as seven taxa of large pelagics (i.e., Thunnus alalunga, Thunnus obesus, Katsuwonus pelamis, Xiphias gladius, Thunnus albacares, and various Istiophoridae) were automatically assigned to catches outside the Chinese EEZ. The rest of the taxa (i.e., those occurring in the Chinese EEZ) were reallocated proportionately to catches either within or outside the Chinese EEZ in order to match Figure 2C. 4 A) 16 Reported to FAO 12 Corrected EEZ catch 8 4 Catch Catch (million t) Over-corrected EEZ Projection 0 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year 100% B) 75% 50% 25% EEZ catch (% total catch) total (% catch EEZ 0% 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year C) 15 Reported to FAO 12 9 Estimated EEZ catch 6 Catch Catch (million t) 3 - 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year Figure 2. Time series data used to estimate China’s current domestic marine fisheries catches: A) time series in Watson and Pauly (2001) showing the total catch reported to FAO at that time (dotted line), as well the estimated corrected (thick line) and over- corrected (thin line) EEZ catch (both time-series carried forward from 2000 to 2010); B) fraction of the total catch caught within the EEZ (from panel A), with the linear regression carried forward to 2010; and C) new total catch reported to FAO (thin line) and updated EEZ catch estimated by applying the trend in B to the new total catch reported to FAO. Catch from 1950 to 1970 are not shown (but see Figures 4 and 5).